[buzzybee]

Riot is most comparable to Slack or Discord. It has chat rooms. It supports voice, image posts, file transfer, etc. It stores conversation history. You can private message people.

Matrix is a generalized protocol for decentralized and federated communications; it's agnostic to the application layer provided by Riot. Something Matrix doesn't have, but is on the issue backlog, is support for email-esque thread contexts. [0]

[0] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/issues/492

[NoGravitas]

I would love to see an email - like application implemented on top of Matrix.

[Arathorn]

we're working on it :>

[nickodell]

Discord/slack isn't federated, is it?

[rahrahrah]

no